Decisions, decisions.

Decisions...

Oh, how to decide which one to press the “post” button for next.

Inkya, binkya, bottle a stinka… the horse ran out and drank it.

(Sorry Corinne and her comment readers, the ugly has to wait just a little longer.)

Since I’ve already taken the red pill and gone down the rabbit hole, I’m visiting a place where decisions are made. The bottle said “Drink Me” – but it got dropped and shattered across the floor.

To hello, or not to hello: that is dang good question... a nod or shrug is good enough for me, though there is hardly any reason to do so...funny how things seem to turn out more often than not. Considering the limited number of people I have talked to, of that there is a considerable portion who I do end up meeting again and they usually turn out to be okay. Uncanny feelings are hard to ignore. (Not that I actually meet or run into any foreign strangers for months at a time.) What will the warm season bring this year?

Just happened to strike up a conversation with an older Japanese couple down from Tokyo. Told them I didn't mean to startle them, but they did seem approachable for some reason, call it a social kind of sixth sense.  Turned out to be nice people and quite open to our micro-chat. Within a period of minutes, we were able to glean a number of things, which are understood to include the following:

1. The husband is from Nagano.

2. The wife is from here (her hometown).

3. They were really just visiting.

4. For me to suddenly approach them was fine. In fact, that is how they met their English teacher who happens to live across the street from them, near a base.

5. A base? They seemed to think that was a good thing. I told them I grew up near one too (and watched for their response, which was an understanding look in their eye, a nod that said, yes, we do know about that stuff too).

Good for them for still being willing to want to speak with foreigners. I also have a lot of respect for a lot of the people I met from the base near where I grew up.

However, I also have an understanding that it is better to let certain things go, to just let people finish shouting and leave.

Shouting.

They had a pickup truck, which is probably where they would have been keeping any firearms they could have maybe retrieved (after having gotten their asses kicked by freaks who understand that, yes, anything goes).  Hard to know when to stop.  And calling the cops would have been a little dicey, considering what we looked like, and for some reason, we just didn’t want to go there. Besides, the parents were gone for a few days, so technically this wasn’t supposed to be happening. 

Anyway…

Back to the prick, his failed pickup and the truck.

Irony is, the two girls they gave a ride home in the open bed of their truck, the underage girls (not technically street legal for alcohol anyway), the girls they were hoping would get drunk off the whiskey (of the two one was strikingly beautiful, one we will call Alice - even though she’s got long black hair) had dropped their bottle on the road on their way home. 

Alice had mentioned the night before, “He was a fucking idiot. We really needed a ride home and he thinks we’d actually be excited to take a drink. Oops. Real cheap shit too.” Alice doesn’t like it when people treat her like she’s actually dumb enough to take the bottle. Yeah, she was fucking cold, but not horny… not for them. Maybe she was just so pissed off that she forgot to give him back his jacket. We weren’t about to ask her either, not after the way she told us, “Just forget it.”

Just that night before, he’d probably said something like, “You must be cold back there. Here’s my jacket." Smile. "A little whiskey might warm you up. Here..." Wink. 

But now this guy was shouting in what he thought was supposed to be an authoritative voice. Um…

Evidently it had taken the two bosom buddies all night long to figure out that Alice was smarter than them.  Because the shouting one was angry when he came back the next morning with his friend (a guy who really didn’t look like he was ready to back anyone up, but they were fellow cuttlefish, none-the-less).  The friend had been smart enough to not enter the house. All bets would have been off.

You see, Alice might not have looked it, but she was part of a group of misfits (read ‘freaks’) who’d been bonking all not long. We all had a deep connection in a way, a connection people who are often threatened share. Technically, I guess you could call it an orgy, but without anyone swapping…

While the fellow with a name I learned from a more respectable crowd (they wear their hair “high and tight’), while this not so Tom of Finland material was actually starting to get a little too dramatic, something started to stir. 

Still shouting…?

I do clearly remember feeling that, yes, we could easily shut the door on these squid (had the other one crossed that threshold), and do something ugly.  There were only two of them, three of us guys, and Alice was definitely getting set up to give new meaning to that old saying, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”  Alice could have easily turned into on of the Banshees and let a little bit of her inner-Siouxsie out.  Not to mention that her fellow lady-freaks were starting to look a little irritated. 

The guy who thought he was big and who was making all of the annoying fuss… 

Maybe he did realize that while he was shouting (or was it whining?), maybe he actually did start to realize that this would not be a good idea for the simple fact that we did not raise anything except an eyebrow when Alice told him, ”Here’s your jacket…” then while starting to raise her voice, said “Now, get the fuck out.” 

We, the guys, kind of let him spend his energy (most likely frustrated because he’d not gotten off while on leave). We didn’t drop any names of higher ranks at the base, though we could have. We didn’t shut them in the house. Though, with a little luck, we could have. We just waited for it [to] dawn on them, mainly him, that the three guys who had spent all night with a group of hot chicks, we guys looked a little unusual.

Maybe it was someone’s fingernail polish (the girls had insisted on doing that, especially the one who seemed to like slow dancing in the Purple Rain), or maybe it was the garter belt someone else was wearing (only that and a ripped up a t-shirt), or the way the worn-out leather jacket I had happened to have on (but hadn’t decided this was worth zipping up at the moment) didn’t look so new at all – like it had been places… whatever it was that made the seamen leave, our group was content to make that ‘day of bliss’ stretch into two.

We could have taken our Matrix in a bad direction, but we chose not to. It had been a collective and somewhat conscious decision.

Besides, Alice had said she’d handle it her way. Like she was enjoying it. Wasn’t about to hand over the limp bowling jacked until she’d said what she was going to say, exactly the way she’d wanted to say it.

The two US Navy Sailors left.

But I do remember the look the one who had shouted almost tried to give us.  Us. The three guys who he’d noticed sitting on the staircase halfway through his tirade after he’d almost literally burst through the door. He may have noticed that, no, we weren’t impressed. And it wasn’t a good idea to bring us into this. For a moment, he looked like he’d wanted to say something, but didn’t.

Okay, back to the numbers.

6. Yes, the elderly couple did have a look in their eye. They definitely understood the practical disadvantages that could arise living next to a base (like the example I just gave you), but the wise couple also seemed to have an understanding that it was still okay to strike up conversations with strangers. 

We didn't exchange names or anything, as it was just kind of by-chance and a good enough meeting, so we left it at that.

And for now, that’s a story...so said the not-so-suave wannabe punter.